DOD’s Next Electronic Health System Rollout Will Be Different, Officials Say

After a poor showing in the first deployment of the MHS GENESIS electronic health records system, officials have retuned the training system and ensured better infrastructure is in place for the next rollout. After a rocky—and ultimately truncated—initial operating test of the Defense Department’s new electronic health records system, the department is getting ready for a second round in September. With key lessons learned from the first rollout, officials say this time will be different.

“We have learned important lessons over the last 18 months at the initial deployment sites in the Pacific Northwest,” Vice Admiral Raquel Bono, director of the Defense Health Agency, told reporters Tuesday. “We will soon be implementing MHS GENESIS at locations in California and Idaho, and the lessons learned from the IOC experience will be essential to our work at these sites.”

The department released the first live version of the MHS GENESIS system at three military hospitals—Fairchild Air Force Base, Naval Hospital Bremerton and Naval Health Clinic Oak Harbor—beginning in February 2017. By January 2018, the rollout was going so poorly the agency considered scrapping plans for a fourth site, Madigan Army Medical Center. DHA officials confirmed to Nextgov that the site had made the transition to the MHS GENESIS platform.